The First Solar Day

After its first Mercury solar day (176 Earth days) in orbit, MESSENGER has nearly completed
two of its main global imaging campaigns: a monochrome map at 250 m/pixel and an eight-
color, 1-km/pixel color map. Apart from small gaps, which will be filled in during the next solar
day, these global maps now provide uniform lighting conditions ideal for assessing the form of
Mercuryʼs surface features as well as the color and compositional variations across the planet.
The orthographic views seen here, centered at 75° E longitude, are each mosaics of thousands
of individual images. At right, images taken through the wide-angle camera filters at 1000, 750,
and 430 nm wavelength are displayed in red, green, and blue, respectively.